Metamorphosis (5 page)

The darkness was abrupt, the light having gone out of the broken mirror, and the night outside silent but for the sound of rain dripping from the eaves and bushes. Michael groped his way out of the dark room and down the hallway without looking back, pushing the window open, climbing through, and shutting it carefully behind him. He crossed the street and locked the door to his parents’ house without going back in, walked to the curb, and got into his car, where he sat breathing heavily for a moment, compelling himself to focus on the unfamiliar instrument panel and the steering wheel. He started the car, switched on the headlights, and pulled away, looking straight ahead, realizing that he had left the light on inside the house, the mail on the chair. He signaled carefully at the corner despite the street’s being empty, deciding not to go back.

Two blocks away, when he pulled into freeway traffic, the tires humming on the wet asphalt, his cell phone rang. He looked down at the display and read off the number, realizing in a confused flood of relief and regret that it was the nursing home calling.

[by James P. Blaylock]

T
HESE STORIES CAME
to be written under curious circumstances—a strange sort of harmonic convergence that’s unlikely to reoccur. Their existence involves, in a roundabout way, one of the coolest things that has happened to me in my writing and teaching careers, both of which have been going along happily for thirty-some years now. Eight years ago, when my son Danny graduated from the Orange County High School of the Arts, I was full of the predictable spirit of celebration, but I was equally full of a nostalgia for good things coming to an end, and in a rash moment I pointed out to Ralph Opacic, the Executive Director of the school, that what the school needed was a creative writing program. Somehow, within the next thirty seconds, I had agreed to put one together, to plan a curriculum, and to find teachers. I called Tim Powers and coerced him into collaborating, and when the school reopened in September, forty creative writing students appeared with high expectations. By then I had signed on to direct the program with Tim as master teacher.
I’ll give it three years
, I assured myself, eight years ago. By now we’ve got 120 students, a ten-teacher faculty, a cool basement library, and an award winning literary magazine.

One afternoon during the second week of school when we first opened for business, I visited the 7
^th
and 8
^th
grade class just to put in an appearance. I planned to say something clever, welcome the kids to the Creative Writing Department, and then drift away. One thing led to another, and I found myself chatting about metaphor in what I hoped was an interesting manner. A small, red-haired, freckle-faced girl raised her hand. She had glittering ivy leaves twined into her hair, as if she had ridden in that morning on a school bus from Oz. She’d been reading the poetry of Adrienne Rich, she told me, and was particularly happy with “Aunt Julia’s Tigers,” and it seemed to her that Rich was using metaphor a little bit differently than what I’d been talking about. She went on to explain….

It’s a sobering moment when you realize that you’ve just been taken out by a twelve-year-old. It was an eye-opening moment, too, and pleasantly so. This twelve-year-old actually read and wrote poetry, and she liked the poetry she read, and she understood it, and she liked to talk about the craft of poetry, too. Apparently I wasn’t in Kansas any more.

Back out in the hallway I ran into Tim. “Watch out for this little red-headed girl who wears strange hats,” he told me. “You won’t be able to fool her.” It turned out that she wasn’t the only student who we wouldn’t be able to fool. I catch the students reading Joyce and Faulkner and Powers and Philip K. Dick at lunch. (A few weeks ago one of them asked me which translation of Proust I prefer. “The good one,” I said, and then pretended that I had a vital appointment to keep across the street at Pop’s Café.) They’re equally likely, of course, to be reading J. K. Rowling or Tolkien or Robert E. Howard. And all of them are guilty, heaven help us, of writing without being told to. In fact, like writers everywhere, they’re sometimes even more likely to write when they’re not told to than when they are. Tim runs a Wednesday afternoon club called the Charmed Quarks. Students chat about physics and poetry, although like healthy kids everywhere, they also come for the food, which Tim hauls in in giant grocery bags from Trader Joe’s. When I get back from the noon Directors meeting there’s nothing left but a couple of sourdough crusts lying on a plate next to
Asimov’s Guide to Science
or
The Collected Poetry of A.E. Housman.

I point all this out to explain why I’m happy to be a teacher, and to reveal that my students are fairly extraordinary. The three young writers who launched these stories are thrilled (I’m pretty sure) to be published in a volume as elegant as this, but I’m not so sure they understand that I’m equally thrilled. In fact, I’m stoked.

These stories came into being when one of the teachers in the program suggested a “major author” class with James P. Blaylock as the author in question. I protested. Predictably, the students informed me that I had no say in the matter, and the class carried on for fifteen 3-hour meetings during which they read and discussed more Blaylock than is strictly speaking healthy. The teacher launched a contest for which students would write “Blaylockian” stories. There was a lot of good work turned in, but Brittany, Alex, and Adriana shared first prize. What prize? We hadn’t thought of that. In a moment of wild abandon I suggested that as a prize I would collaborate, adding my two cents worth to the stories, and that we would try to sell the result. Wild abandon seems to work out pretty well sometimes.

Of the three stories, Brittany’s, “P-38,” with its dusty sidewalks and fading shadows, seems to me to read a little bit like a Powers and Blaylock collaboration. I’m thinking of “We Traverse Afar” and “The Better Boy.” It’s set in Tim’s old Alville neighborhood, which happens to be right across the street from our school. Alex’s story turned out to be fairly dark, reminding me some of elements of
Winter Tides
or
Night Relics
, although I’m pretty sure she hadn’t read either one before writing the piece. It’s a sort of story that I wouldn’t have written if left to my own devices. That’s one of the things I particularly like about collaborations, especially these. Adriana’s story is set in downtown Orange, my own neighborhood. As Stan Robinson one time pointed out, it exists in a kind of time warp. I suspect that some of my neighbors are hatching out dinosaur eggs as we speak.

I’m the first to admit that there’s often a notable level of nostalgia in my stories and novels—a regret for things passing away: people and houses and objects that are disinclined to give up the ghost (which is one of those clichéd, ready made phrases that actually has elements of both truth and poetry in it). Sometimes the ghosts should be laid to rest, and sometimes they should be invited in and offered a room of their own. Brittany, Alex, and Adriana caught that element effortlessly and authentically, each in her own way.

Tomorrow night is graduation, and the three of them, along with twenty-six other seniors from the department, will be pitching their mortarboards into the air, free at last. I’ll be handing out ribbons, and I’ll do my share of clapping, but I won’t be able to shake the knowledge that way leads on to way, as the poet said. I doubt that I’ll be inclined to pitch anything into the air.

Jim Blaylock

June, 2008

B
ILL
S
CHAFER OUT
there at Subterranean Press asked me to say a few words about this book, and I’m happy to oblige. If you’ve read Blaylock and Powers, maybe you know who I am, and maybe you know that Bill calls me in to oversee things whenever the two of them are putting up some kind of literary project. It might surprise you to know that when I was a younger man I was a bouncer at Bumsteady’s Hidey-Hole, a watering place down at the old Pike in Long Beach. Literary bouncer is more in my line these days. The pay isn’t much, but I take a certain pleasure in the work, and I can assure the worried public that Brittany, Adriana, and Alex will be paid for their efforts. Yesterday I saw to it that Blaylock returned that high-definition TV to Costco along with the Red Devil Automatic Hot Dog Cooker and the King O’ Lounge chair. I’ve got my eye on the man, and those three young women can rest easy.

Now I don’t mean to rain on Blaylock’s parade, but I’m a man who values the truth. When Blaylock anted up the idea to start this writing department at the high school out in Santa Ana, he did what you might call some finagling. What he actually told Dr. Opacic was that he would “bring in Ashbless” to put things together for him. Dr. Opacic was keen on the deal, because he had read some of my work, and so he put up the capital to make it happen, with Blaylock as the go-between. I knew nothing of it at the time, and I wouldn’t know anything for close onto three months.

What happened was that Powers and Blaylock whittled the money away over the course of the summer, eating pizza and driving around town doing what they call research. Come late August all they had to show for it was litter—a back seat full of empty pizza boxes and doughnut bags. They showed up at my apartment on Ximeno late one afternoon in a pretty bad way, saying they wanted to hire me on as a “consultant,” and could I please have something put together by Tuesday? Otherwise, they said, there’d be forty kids crying their eyes out on the 10
^th
Street sidewalk in Santa Ana.

So I up and did it. I stayed up late and called in favors, and come Tuesday they had themselves a program and teachers to boot. What I got for my efforts was a six pack of Dad’s Root Beer and a bag of some kind of hot pepper potato chips that turned out to be stale. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I’d do it for the children.

And now I’m going to put my stamp of approval on this volume, and point out how happy I am that Blaylock has found these three brilliant young women to write his stories for him. He says that he put in his “two cents worth,” but I’m pretty sure he got change back for his effort. Anyone who’s read the man’s “work” can see in a cold moment that he farmed these out, and for that we owe him a debt of gratitude.

William Ashbless

Long Beach, California

If you've enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you'll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.

For the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy …

For the most comprehensive collection of classic SF on the internet …

Visit the SF Gateway.

www.sfgateway.com

The Elfin Series

The Elfin Ship

The Disappearing Dwarf

The Stone Giant

Langdon St Ives

Homunculus
*

Lord Kelvin’s Machine
*

Other Novels

The Digging Leviathan

Land Of Dreams

The Last Coin